Essays, Analyses and Meditations

Identity

The neural connections that define what you are (what you remember,
how you think) change all the time. They are changing as you are reading these
sentences.

You and yourself as a child have physically nothing in common.

Memory is "reconstructive". We do not remember things as they are: we
store them in a convenient format and "reconstruct" them when we need them.
For example, you don't remember a movie, scene by scene and word by word, although
you "remember" what happened in the movie. What you remember is not the movie,
but a "representation" of the movie. A computer can store an entire movie as
it is. Human memory cannot. We store it in a format that will allow us to
retrieve the essence of it, i.e. to "reconstruct" it.
This also means that we create our past every time we remember it.

Ecological systems are networks of living beings: every living being
interacts with the environment, both determining it and being determined by it.
We exist only insofar as we are part of an environment.

In the quantum world it is the observer that "collapses" reality. There is
no reality until someone observes it.

Furthermore in the quantum world everything is connected with everything
else, because each "wave" (that describes a system) is ultimately connected
to all other waves (to all the other systems in the universe).

There is an equivalence of sorts between General Relativity and psychology:
every person "warps" the psychological universe of everybody else nearby.
This is equivalent to saying that there is a universal psyche that is warped
by individual selves, and this warping in turn affects the behavior of each
individual self.

Every birth is a resurrection with foreknowledge of the future because
each individual is the result of natural selection (among other things).
We are born only once but we "are" many other people who pre-existed us,
whose lives and deaths told us something about how to live in the future based
on what happened to them in the past.

From several different perspectives we obtain the same conclusion: the
self does not exist alone. The self is a function of all other selves.
Your identity fluctuates. You cannot be yourself twice no more than you can
enter the same river twice.